I have always been fascinated learning about the nature of realty, not ever being so sure of what that is. Naturally, such an interest led me to the study of physics. But I always considered physics an esoteric field, understood only by old guys with frizzy white hair shooting out from their scalps, like that had just received a massive electric shock.

Undaunted, I searched out and had taken to reading ‘introductory’ accounts of physics, supposedly written for those like me unschooled in a formal physics education. So, imagine my delight when I came across two of Carlo Rovelli’s books; Reality is Not what it Seems, and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, both written to make physics more accessible to people like me. I was anxious to get started, determined to go slow, re-read pages any as needed and persist until I understood difficult concepts and could see them in my ‘mind’s eye’, like Einstein’s thought experiments.

What a disappointment. Rovelli’s explanations of elusive physics concepts and terms were almost equally as elusive and murky; the world as granular, not continuous; Einstein’s ‘extended present’; the curing of space-time; the probability and randomness of electrons; the unreconciled conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics; the world ‘quantum field’.

Having finished the 2 books, I now know less than I originally thought I did about the nature of reality and how things work. I’m tempted to go back to the Buddhist take on the 3 characteristics of nature; impermanence, selfless and suffering. This seems more my speed and makes more sense since I can understand impermanence (of my evasive grasp of physics) and suffering (from my attempt to learn it).

So my point of all this is; why can’t a really smart physicist write a book about physics that speaks ‘physi-ese’ but then provides common, everyday analogies and examples that we are all familiar with in order to make it easier to understand the concepts, ideas, theories and processes that physics covers. After all, a definition of a good teacher is someone who can explain difficult ideas in easily understandable terms. I think such a book would make physics more interesting and accessible to a much larger pool of people who don’t have frizzy, white hair that looks like it had been electric shockied